Cleaning Supplies for a Four Year Old

I mentioned several posts ago that 4 year old V had become my little helper around the house.

I was recently inspired to put together a little cleaning basket for her and her brother, after browsing through a Montessori catalog. I knew they'd love having "their own" things to clean with, and although the Montessori materials are always lovely to look at, I figured I could come up with something serviceable for a lot less cash.

I ended up picking up most of the supplies at the dollar store.

Preschooler's cleaning basket.

Our basket includes the following items:
Spray bottles, filled mostly with water, and a little Dr Bronner's soap.
Several microfiber towels
A Squeegee (possibly her favorite tool)
Several microfiber dusters

We also have a child sized broom and dust pan.

L is still a pretty reluctant cleaner, but V is now volunteering to clean the kitchen table and the windows.(Score one for mom, since it had been uh, a while since I cleaned the windows.) She also sweeps with me every day.

She's feeling very proud of her contributions, and is learning real life skills. I've been guilty at times of underestimating what little kids could really do, but I stand corrected.

Bird Themed Sensory Bin

We're starting a unit on birds here, and I put together a little sensory bin, mainly for 2 year old V. The filler is sunflower seed bird feed. I picked up the little nest and the wooden eggs at Hobby Lobby. They had neat little birds constructed of real feathers and styrofoam, but I know my (rough) kids would break them. I settled on these little plush duck cat toys. Throughout the month, I'm going to add other things to it to maintain interest: feathers, other birds, smaller eggs, maybe some felt or pipe cleaner worms.

Week in Review: Apple Week

This week we learned about one of L's favorite things: apples.

Here are some of the theme related activities we did.


I switched out last week's "pumpkins" for "apples" this week, and the kids continued with the tweezing activitiy.

L worked on an apple themed lacing card. He's gotten so much better at stuff like this. It's awesome.

He practiced writing some apple related words of his choosing.

We did the sort of obligatory apple printing. In the future, I'll be sure to pay a little more attention to what I'm doing. I thought I was pouring tempera paint for the kids, but it was acrylic paint. Oops. They made quite a mess. I was able to salvage everything except V's beloved Kai Lan shirt.

We ate lots of apple products. L is shown below, happily eating apple slices, apple Cheerios (yes, I know, that one was a stretch,) dehydrated apples, and drinking apple juice.

I made homemade apple scented play doh, as shown in the top picture. I must have done something wrong though. Although it smelled good, the texture was way off, nearly impossible to knead. I'm putting the home made play doh in the craft fail category.

I saw this post at Welcome to Our Wonderland, and borrowed her idea for the apple scented sensory tub. I put oatmeal, cinnamin, some small sand toys I found on clearance at Target a couple of weeks ago, and some teeny fimo clay apples in it. V's had a lot of fun making "pies" and making messes.

L and I spent lots of time reading. By the end of the week, he was able to read a good bit of Ten Apples Up on Top to me, which was pretty exciting for both of us.

To be honest, we've been a little lopsided here lately, very heavy on the reading, and pretty light on most of the other stuff. I'm trying to keep the momentum going though. He's excited about reading more and more, and for now, I'm going to roll with that.

Below are some of the resources we used and enjoyed this week.

Fall Tweezing Activity for Fine Motor Skills

Here's a super quick, super easy fall themed tweezing activity we're been working on this week. The brown pom poms represent "dirt," and the orange ones represent "pumpkins." The object is to "pick pumpkins from the pumpkin patch."

Tweezing activity shown here, along with some of our other fall activities.

(This isn't L's favorite sort of activity, but by incorporating a few minutes here and there of this sort of practice, his fine motor skills have really been improving by leaps and bounds.)

Fall Themed Sensory Bin

Here's our newest sensory bin.

The theme for this one is fall. I picked up the package of fabric leaves at Dollar Tree, and while they were initially pretty crunched up, a few minutes with the iron on on a low setting left them looking much better. The little plastic acorns and pumpkins also came from Dollar Tree. (I picked up several packages of each, and will additionally using them as math manipulatives this month.)
I added some Little People and Little People animals we already had, and there you go, a little farm in the fall.
The kids can search for the acorns and pumpkins, pretend to rain leaves down on the "farm," or just free play with it.

Solar System Sensory Bin

To go along with this month's Space theme, I put together this sensory bin for the kids.

I referred to a poster we have of the solar system to come up with rough approximations of the sun, the moon, and the planets in Fimo clay. "Space" is represented here with black marbles. They're cold and smooth to the touch.

Finally, I was brainstorming about how to come up with some astronauts and space shuttles, when I found a pack of space themed erasers at my local Dollar Tree. Perfect!

Easy Sensory Bins for Little Ones

The kids are still really into the sensory bins I've set up for them. For this week's WFMW post, I thought I'd show and tell about a few of the ones they've been playing with recently.





First off, there's this one, filled with dried split peas, Playmobil toys, and teeny plastic animals. It's fun to find all of the animals, or just to set up a little farm. The peas feel neat to run your hands through. This has been one of V's favorite variations of this idea so far.



This one is a bit more challenging. The idea here is to go on a "treasure hunt," and find all the polished stones from among the mixed beans. It's harder than it looks. (I used my old childhood rock collection for this one. If you didn't have rocks, you could also do something similar with beads.)

Cheap, easy, unplugged ways to entertain the kids works for me. For more WFMW posts, check out www.wearethatfamily.com.

Linked to Whatever Goes Wednesday at Someday Crafts.

Montessori Hack: Dressing Boards

Here's my latest project in this series.
In case you're wondering why I've been on this kick lately, I thought I'd give a little background. I don't post a great deal about my children's day to day lives, and particularly my son's special needs, largly out of respect for their privacy. I don't want them to be completely mortified one of these days when they're teenagers, and accidentally stumble across mom's blow by blow description of their potty training dilemmas or whatever.
With regards to my son, suffice it to say that he is a very bright, high functioning little boy, who almost certainly falls somewhere on the Autistic spectrum. He's currently receiving occupational therapy for SPD and fairly significant fine motor skill delay.

I've been trying to come up with ways to help L improve his fine motor skills, which are at this point limiting our ability to move forward with writing, etc. A lot of the Montessori activities lend themselves to that end, so that's why I've been busily coming up with quickie, cheapo knockoffs of proper Montessori materials.
Anyway, here's my version of a dressing board. L still has a good bit of difficulty buttoning shirts, and I thought this might help with that particular skill, as well as perhaps improve his motor control in general. As I run across other suitable clothes, I may make further additions to this series...
I basically just hacked up one of his shirts, and stapled it to a cheap wooden Ikea picture frame, using a heavy duty stapler. I used pinking shears on the shirt to minimize fraying.




It occurs to me that this would have almost certainly looked neater if I had measured a little more carefully, and used some sort of glue, instead of staples.
Nonetheless the result is pretty sturdy, and entirely functional, if not beautiful. :)

Montessori Hack: Busy Board

After investigating several versions of "busy boards" online and in various books and catalogs, we decided to construct our own. The board part is a little chopping block we got on clearance at Ikea a while back, for another project that never came to be. We've been picking up odds and ends when we're out to add to the board, and will continue to do so until it's full. Some of ideas were directly inspired from ready made versions, others were off the top of our head.

This project had the added benefit of being something L and his daddy could work on together. (I love that.)

Sensory Box Variations: Gardening and Bugs

Here are some recent variations on our sensory box. First we had this one,in a gardening theme, filled with Play Mobil people, dogs, bunnies, and vegetables.

After that, I switched over to a bug theme, with these dollar store bugs, although I'm going to be on the lookout for some smaller bugs, which would be more fun to hide and find.



As simple as it seems, the kids don't seem to tire of this idea.

Fine Motor Skills Practice: Rice transfer

Just another quick post about another quick, easy activity for working on fine motor skills. The point on this one is obviously to transfer rice from one little bowl to another without spilling it. It's harder than it looks for the little ones.

(Who am I kidding? My hands shake quite a bit too...)

Fine Motor Skills Practice: Pom Pom Tweezing

Nearly everyone has done a version of this at some time, but here's mine. There's a little measuring spoon to start with, and hopefully L will eventually graduate to the tweezers. The idea is just to scoop or tweeze the pom poms from one compartment to the other.
L's fine motor skills are somewhat delayed, so this is good practice for him. Two year old V also enjoys working on it.